GenAI will shrink 'corporate' ranks, Amazon's Jassy says

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Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy on Tuesday told employees that the rapid expansion of generative AI (GenAI) across the company will, over time, reduce the number of people needed in certain corporate roles—even as the retail giant unlocks entirely new ways of working, creating value, and reimagining what employees can do.

In a candid internal memo that doubles as both a warning and a call to action, Jassy said Amazon is now building more than 1,000 genAI applications, touching everything from a smarter Alexa to AI-powered shopping assistants and seller tools, all of which are reshaping the company’s internal workflows and customer-facing experiences.

As a result, he noted, routine tasks that once required manual input are now being taken over by AI agents that can forecast demand, manage inventory, answer customer queries, and generate content in real time.

“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he wrote.

Jassy emphasized that this transformation is already visible across nearly every arm of the business.

From Alexa+—a smarter, more capable voice assistant that can now take actions on behalf of users—to tools that help shoppers find the right size or buy from third-party websites, AI is already playing a lead role in reinventing customer experience.

“You can see it with our AI shopping assistant that’s being used by tens of millions of customers around the world to discover new products and make more informed purchase decisions,” he wrote.

Sellers too are benefiting, with nearly half a million using genAI tools to create “measurably better” product listings.

Internally, Amazon is also applying genAI to streamline operations. AI agents are helping improve “inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots,” while a rebuilt customer service chatbot powered by genAI is offering what Jassy says is “an even better experience than we’d had before.”

Across AWS, the company is investing heavily in infrastructure, including custom silicon like Trainium2, and services such as SageMaker, Bedrock, and its own foundation model, Nova. “Today, we have over 1,000 Generative AI services and applications in progress or built,” Jassy noted. “But at our scale, that’s a small fraction of what we will ultimately build.”

Looking ahead, Jassy made it clear that Amazon is betting big on AI agents—software that can perform complex tasks for users. “Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems,” he wrote, predicting that “there will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field.”

For Amazon, he said, the appeal lies in how these agents will change “the scope and speed at which we can innovate for customers.” Agents, he added, will be “teammates that we can call on at various stages of our work, and that will get wiser and more helpful with more experience.”

Despite the magnitude of the change, Jassy’s message to employees was not one of fear but of engagement. He urged them to “be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can.”

“Agents will be teammates that we can call on at various stages of our work, and that will get wiser and more helpful with more experience. If we build and leverage the right agents, it’s going to rapidly accelerate our ability to make customers lives easier and better every day, and it’s going to make our jobs even more exciting and fun than they are today,” he wrote.

Drawing on his own early days at Amazon in the late 1990s, he said he worked on lean teams that moved quickly and had broad remits. With genAI, he believes that “the most transformative technology since the Internet is here,” and those who engage deeply with it “will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”

In closing, Jassy struck a note of ambition and urgency. “We’re going to lean in further in the coming months,” he wrote. “There’s so much more to come with Generative AI… and I’m looking forward to partnering with you all as we change what’s possible for our customers, partners, and how we work.”